Nude Greenwich Village Art Show Spurs Nostalgia, Publicity

The latest live-nude-girl-in-art controversy -- naked girl in gallery window under netting -- has some ties to old ones.

The Times tells us today that the "Greenwich Village art gallery" from the window of which an undressed woman was removed by police request, and to which she has apparently returned, is Chair and the Maiden, which showed the nude photos infamously taken in the subway by Zach Hyman last summer. These guys will never want for patrons.

Also, the Times' experts who give the pros and cons are Daniel S. Connolly, onetime lawyer for the Giuliani Administration in its persecution of public-mass-nude photographer Spencer Tunick (Connolly still works for Giuliani via the Bracewell & Giuliani law firm), and Ron Kuby, who represented Tunick at that time. ("Lying down in the street naked with other people in order to express the duality of nature versus man," says Kuby, "or to illustrate some post-apocalyptic vision," blah blah artistic freedom.)

The slide show of the Brian Reed installation (warning: awful folk music) is prefaced by links to its press coverage, and suggests there are nude and semi-nude men involved in the show as well, but no one's talking about them.

Word of the nude show at the Greenwich Village art gallery has spread to Arkansas, which assures that, as in the days of Oh! Calcutta! (and Bathtub, which so discomfited Oscar and Felix on Season 1 of The Odd Couple), America will continue to view the district as a hotbed of nakedness, and flock here on tour buses. Mission accomplished!